[zakthor]

Need some xmas reading recommendations?

I read Maniac by Benjamin Labatut and yeah its really depressing. There's a chapter written in the voice of richard feynman that discusses the ignition of Ivy Mike and it convinced indifferent 50 something year old me that its a terrible thing that h-bombs even exist.

But Labatut wrote an earlier book called "When we cease to understand the world". These are i don't know what - semi-fictional essays - but wow they have my number. I've read a lot but I've never read anything that hit me so emotionally and made me despair about humanity. Crazy this thin little book can have such an impact. My take on his thesis is that mathematics has become larger than man and the results are destroying us. Damn. He takes a bunch of true stuff and weaves it into an awful narrative.

Apparently he's a poet from chile.